


Favorite Things

by EntreNous



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-02-14
Updated: 2004-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-26 11:45:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EntreNous/pseuds/EntreNous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lindsey can’t stop thinking about Angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Favorite Things

**Author's Note:**

> Set during s1 of AtS. Written for a BtVS/Ats Valentine's Ficathon.

Apparently Angel had a thing for blondes.

Lindsey got the first folder about twenty-four hours after his client has been thrown out of a conference room window. They all got the first folder, a thin sheath containing matching sets of dryly-worded memos attached to the preliminary findings.

Lindsey went through the first gathering of materials more avidly than most. Then he ordered up two related, special reports. He wouldn’t have them for at least a week, the assistant head of the research department had told him smoothly. Lindsey had just nodded understandingly and made a mental note of her name for future reference. Just one more person to fuck over when he got the chance, which probably wouldn’t be coming anytime soon. He was hardly head and shoulders above the other juniors at the firm at that point, and besides, he was on the company’s shit list after what had occurred in that off-site meeting.

He had stood there, fucking helpless, while the glass erupted outward on impact, turning briefly into a widening constellation of prisms that caught the sun’s rays and fragmented them into colors. The client had gone out sputtering and snarling even as he’d hurtled down the outside of the building still in his office chair, bursting into flames along the way.

No one blamed Lindsey, Holland told him reassuringly. Being in the client’s building, they hadn’t had their own system of watch guards and mystics, so they’d no way to anticipate and prevent the situation. It wasn’t Lindsey’s fault. Nonetheless, Lindsey caught an awful lot of sour looks from people in the halls. Twenty-million account down the drain. Not the kind of thing that happened every day. And he wasn’t the only one who’d gone off retainer by any means when they’d lost that client. “Might as well kiss our Christmas bonuses goodbye,” Lilah had said despairingly as they passed each other in the hall, both working late for the fifth night that week. Lindsey had had to scramble to get in on two other projects to make up the lost billable hours.

Still, the first round of information he got his hands on didn’t indicate that there was a need for future concern. Of all the dumb luck, his squash partner had said sympathetically -- just had to happen on Lindsey’s watch that Angel had taken a shot at the big boys. All signs pointed to the fact that Angel wasn’t such a player after all; most of the activity Lindsey heard about that fall was strictly small-time, cases that would’ve been impressive for a random P.I. only because of the supernatural angle. So the dramatic arrival in that one meeting, the shock of watching that account literally fly out the window . . . Well, it’d been a one-time thing, he told himself.

But it didn’t hurt to be prepared. So he started building a case-history, and while much of it had been pretty standard for vampire activity up until the turn of the century (fucking Scourge of Europe -- yeah, right, he’d scoffed to the fall intern working with his team. So Angel had killed people. He was *supposed* to kill people. It would’ve been weirder if he’d been saving orphans or some shit like that), there were some intriguing observations here and there about his behavior patterns. The penchant for blondes, for instance.

The soul-thing was a surprise, though Holland hadn’t seemed too put out by that information when they’d had a quick meeting of the minds about it very early on in the game. Based on that reaction, Lindsey guessed that Holland already his own set of files and folders on Angel – clearly with a hell of a lot more information that Lindsey had been able to scrounge up.

So maybe the guy was more of a player than Lindsey had originally thought. He silently congratulated himself on his information gathering as the fact that Angel was a larger liability than they’d all anticipated became more and more evident. The fact that other W&H lawyers had counted Angel-related losses on their quarterly reports was reassuring. The stakes were getting higher all the time -- the loss of a seer that would have helped on a number of key projects; the profitable connection to mob business that they’d had to walk away from once Angel had forced their hand on the sensitivity training/possession.

The first few incidents that Lindsey set up had been small-time. He’d tossed a few cases Angel’s way to gauge his response to different scenarios, and it was clear that Angel’s fangs were set on edge by two situations in particular: blondes in peril, and little kids that freaks messed with. Lindsey had zero interest in hurting kids, so that left the blondes.

First he’d put a girl or two in Angel’s path for him to stumble upon. They’d been dead already, of course, and the couple of flunkies that he trusted to observe the situations had reported that Angel had indeed seemed shaken. Lindsey shifted tactics, tried a couple of other bodies, and pretty much it’d been what he predicted. Angel hated to see death, hated to find people that he could have helped and hadn’t, but he hated it a hell of a lot more to discover a corpse that was pretty, petite, and blond.

Then Lindsey had figured out that that scenario wasn’t nearly as satisfying as setting up an *almost*-dead girl for Angel to find. Drained to the point of last gasp, beaten within an inch of her life, drugged so that her heart was thumping slow, slower, slowest -- it didn’t matter much, just so that they had all died soon after Angel found them. Nothing huge, nothing overly *significant* -- just enough to hit Angel where it hurt, enough to see a flash of pain cross his face. Lindsey treasured those moments especially, especially after he had arranged to start recording the encounters for future viewing.

All of the girls had been wanna-be starlets, dime-a-dozen extras that no one would miss. Plus, they’d all been girls that had gotten on Wolfram & Hart’s bad side somehow, so that when Holland figured out what Lindsey had been up to, Lindsey wouldn’t get any flak about the victims. Most of them had already been worked over in other situations anyway, some of the circumstances Wolfram & Hart orchaestrated, so Lindsey didn’t have much on his head besides arranging for them to be found in various artful situations.

That’d been the kicker. Figuring out the Angel, Angelus, whoever the fuck he thought he was, had considered himself an *artist*. Fancied himself a master of the sublime act of pursuit and death. It wasn’t just about the girls; it was the look, the tableau, the image that lingered beyond that last breath. And if Lindsey was appealing to that sense of aesthetics, he’d have Angel in pocket before too long.

And he needed to be ready, because it wouldn’t take forever. Holland would find out. He wasn’t going to be happy about Lindsey going behind his back, but Lindsey felt certain that all of that research and investment would really pay off. He had the proof he needed to make the request for the real deal, all of those clips of Angel at that moment of discovery, all those stop-starts of nearly imperceptible rage, then sadness, then, just at the end, that fleeting look of sharp desire.

If he could find the *right* blonde, then Lindsey knew, he just *knew* -- Angel would be his.


End file.
